Snow Blind

15

Johnny McLaren was alone in Homicide by the time Tinker finally made it to the office. He was standing by the coffeemaker, mug in hand, watching the drips come out as if there were a speed limit on the damn things. His red hair was sticking out as if he’d been electrocuted, and his narrow face was the unhealthy color of a vanilla milk shake.

‘Sorry I’m late, Johnny.’

‘Jeez, Tinker, I almost called the dogs out on you. Janis called three hours ago, said you were going to make a quick personal stop. I figured you were nose down in a ditch somewhere, and I couldn’t get through to your cell.’

Tinker hung up his coat, straightened it on the hanger, then slumped into his chair. ‘Yeah, I was working the cell pretty hard. The personal stop turned into what might be some bad business.’

McLaren held his breath. If he had any kind of a curse attached to his Irish heritage, it wasn’t his weekend love affair with fine aged whiskey – that had nothing to do with being Irish, and everything to do with being a cop and a lonely man. His real curse was his morbid and fearful imagination. Ten seconds after Tinker said ‘bad business,’ his mind had leaped to the conclusion that the personal stop was a doctor appointment, and that Tinker was dying of some horrible terminal illness, would probably drop dead at his desk before the day was over.

‘Jesus, Tinker, what is it? Are you okay?’

‘I don’t know. The whole thing feels wrong…’ Tinker looked up at McLaren’s face, falling by the second, and almost rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, come on, Johnny. You’re always doing this. One of us gets a hangnail, you’re up all night worried we’ve got flesh-eating bacteria or something. You’ve got to stop or you’ll drive yourself crazy. I’m fine. It’s Steve I’m worried about.’

‘Oh. Good. Steve who?’

So Tinker gave him a quick rundown, and Johnny listened quietly, trying not to look elated that it wasn’t Tinker, it was only one of his friends who might be in trouble. When Tinker shoved the picture of the brutalized ex-wife under his nose, he caught his breath.

‘Jesus. They let this guy out?’

‘They did.’

‘And right now the only person who knows where this woman is, is the guy that did this to her?’

‘You got it.’

‘Whose job is it to find her?’

Tinker shrugged. ‘By the time I follow that trail he could be in Julie Albright’s backyard. I put Tommy Espinoza on it. He’s hacking into a bunch of secure websites as we speak, breaking all kinds of laws trying to find her. If he can’t, he’s going to call the Monkeewrench people.’

‘So we wait on that one. What about your friend?’

‘That’s a waiting game, too. The scene’s weird, but there’s no place to go with it from what I saw. So I called in Crime Scene, hoping they might pull a rabbit out of the hat. Told them it was a possible, which is a hell of stretch from the physical evidence. I’m going to get called on the carpet for this one.’ He jumped when the phone rang and grabbed it before McLaren even thought to move, hoping to hear Espinoza’s voice, or maybe even someone from the Crime Scene Unit, but it was only Evelyn on the switchboard. He spent a few minutes calming her down – funny, that he was so good at calming other people when he felt like jumping out of his own skin – then hung up. ‘Snowman calls keep coming in,’ he explained to McLaren. ‘Evelyn’s running out of Valium.’

McLaren shrugged it off. ‘It’s been like that all morning. A kid builds a snowman in his own front yard, ten seconds later the next door neighbor’s dialing 911 trying to get a unit sent out to knock it down, see if there’s a body inside. You know how many snowmen the kids in this city build after a storm?’

‘Probably a lot…’

‘You got no idea. And then you’ve got the do-it-yourselfer paranoiacs who bust up the neighbor kid’s snowman themselves, the kids freak, the parents get pissed, want their neighbor arrested for trespassing and destruction of private property and traumatizing their kids, blah, blah, blah. They got a double shift running in the 911 center and they’re still swamped, and God help the poor bastard who tries to call in a real emergency.’

Tinker took a breath and switched gears from Steve Doyle and Julie Albright back to the job he was supposed to be doing today. ‘So where is everybody? I thought we were going to have a full house.’

McLaren headed back to the coffeemaker. ‘We do. Everybody’s in. A lot are out in the field, muscling informants or doing the last of the interviews on people who were at the park yesterday; others are locked in dark rooms all over the house, watching the newsvideo and a ton of out-of-focus home movies of red-cheeked kids with snot running out of their noses, which is a colossal waste of time, if you ask me. No way the doer hung around for family photos.’

‘Some of the really sick ones do.’ Tinker finally got around to hanging up his coat, pushing to the back of his mind the involuntary thought of Steve Doyle’s coat hanging in the empty parole office.

‘Yeah, I know. It’s got to be done, but it’s a pain.’

‘Where are Magozzi and Gino?’

McLaren looked confused for a moment, then rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. ‘Oh, man, of course you didn’t hear…’

‘Hear what?’

‘We might have another snowman up in Dundas County.’

Roadrunner’s face, feet, and hands were completely numb and his body was encased in what had to be a half-inch of icy snow, which made him think about the snowman murders yesterday. He shivered, but it had nothing to do with the temperature. If he made it to Harley’s before he froze to the seat of his bike and turned into a snowman himself, he’d be lucky.

In spite of the nasty weather and impending hypothermia, he paused on the Hennepin Avenue Bridge to catch his breath, as he always did when he took this route, looking at the great, frozen Mississippi, the Stone Arch Bridge beyond, and the old brick riverfront mill buildings that had long since been renovated to store people instead of flour and grain. They looked like old postcards superimposed on the backdrop of downtown’s sleek, modern high-rises. It was a pretty city, even in the snowy gloom of January, and it didn’t seem right that such horrible murders could happen in a nice place like this.

He stayed there as long as he could stand it, then pedaled hard across the bridge, taking two bad falls on the ice before he realized there was no way he was going to make it to Harley’s on his bicycle. He turned around and headed back to his house.

The path Roadrunner had shoveled down his driveway was a perfect fit for his mountain bike, but it wasn’t nearly wide enough to accommodate even one of Harley’s Hummer’s oversized tires. But five-foot drifts were child’s play for the massive vehicle, and Harley plowed straight up to the front door and leaned on the horn.

Roadrunner waved from the front window of his colorful Nicollet Island Victorian, closed the shades, and hurried out the front door, limping slightly. ‘Thanks for the ride,’ he said as he clambered into the huge truck and buckled himself in.

‘I can’t believe you were stupid enough to even try to bike over today. How’s your knee?’

Roadrunner touched the throbbing goose egg he’d sustained on one of his falls and cringed. ‘It’s okay. I put ice on it. And I had to give it a try. Cabs and buses aren’t running today.’

‘You’ve gotta get yourself some wheels one of these days, you know that?’ He patted the steering wheel tenderly. ‘Get one of these little honeys and it’ll change your life. Might even be able to score yourself a date.’

‘This thing is obscene. I can’t believe you bought it.’

‘Lighten up. I’m a big man and I need big wheels. Besides, it’s not like I live in L.A. and I’m shuttling kids to soccer practice in it. This is strictly a winter vehicle, and we live in Minnesota.’

‘You could have bought a hybrid. They have some nice hybrid SUVs now.’

‘Right. They’re nice if you hate cars. I mean, do you see Arnold driving a hybrid? I don’t think so.’ Harley put the Hummer in reverse and stomped on the accelerator. It didn’t even shimmy as it munched over an icy drift.

Roadrunner rolled his eyes and gave up on a losing battle. ‘So why are you so hot on working today? I thought you were bored.’

‘I was, until I started playing around on the Web last night and came across some pretty wild stuff about that whole snowman thing in the park yesterday.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, just for the hell of it, I plugged the Monkeewrench crime stat software in to cruise the net before I went to bed last night, just to see if any twisted sister had ever put a body in a snowman before. When I got up and checked the run record this morning, the thing had worked six hours before it pulled one hit, some renegade thread from a chat room, and it didn’t say much – just “Minneapolis snowmen” and a couple lines in all caps that said, “Kill him while there’s still time. Put him in a snowman.”’

Roadrunner shrugged. ‘So what? There’s a million crazies on the Web saying sick crap like that.’

‘I’m with you a hundred percent on that, but the thing is, that message was posted at nine a.m. Central Standard Time, yesterday morning.’

‘Uh… okay. Is that supposed to mean something?’

Harley scowled at him. ‘Hell, yes, it means something! Think, Roadrunner – Magozzi and Gino didn’t find the bodies until noon Saturday. Three hours after the original post. Somebody knew about those bodies in the snowmen a long time before they were discovered.’

Roadrunner’s mouth dropped open. ‘Holy shit, Harley. Did you go into the chat room? Did you trace the thread?’

‘I sure as hell tried. I couldn’t hack that site to save my life.’

‘Come on…’

‘I’m serious. This thing’ll drive you nuts. The URLs keep shifting, the codes keep changing, and I’m thinking they’ve got this thing programmed to reroute on some kind of a weird loop. You know the last time I couldn’t hack into any site?’

‘Never.’

‘Exactly.’

Roadrunner’s eyes started jerking back and forth the way they did when he got upset. ‘We’ve got to find a way, Harley. We’ve got to trace that thread, and then we’ve got to call Magozzi.’

‘Now you know why we’re all working today.’

Grace was trying to coax magic out of one of the several Monkeewrench computers when Harley and Roadrunner got up to the third-floor office in Harley’s Summit Avenue mansion. Annie Belinsky was hovering behind her, all her glorious excess poundage decked out in a red velvet dress with white ermine trim and matching knee-high stiletto boots.

‘Any luck yet?’ Harley asked as he shrugged out of his jacket and tossed it on the floor.

Annie shook her head in disgust. ‘We’ve been going at it from separate angles, and a few minutes ago Grace managed to break through a firewall. In the time it took me to walk from my desk to hers, it kicked her off.’

Grace pushed herself away from the desk and rubbed her eyes. ‘And I just figured out why. There was another firewall behind the first one; probably another one behind that. We did what? Seven corporate security jobs in the past three months? And this is as good as anything we did. Maybe better, and it’s just a stupid chat room.’

Annie click-clacked back to her own desk and cleared her screen. ‘Lord, I hate it when people try to keep me out of a conversation. Forward the path you took, Grace. I don’t care how many firewalls there are, I’m going to knock them down one by one until I get in there.’

‘I put the path on the network so we could all work it, but this is going to take a while…’ The phone interrupted her. She picked up when she saw Minneapolis Police come up on the caller ID. She listened for a minute, then said, ‘Give me the name, and then give us five minutes.’ She ended the call quickly, then spun her chair to look at the rest of them. ‘Forget the chat room for now. That was Tommy Espinoza from MPD. He needs some help in a hurry.’

‘Something to do with the snowman murders?’ Annie asked.

‘No. It’s a different case. We have to find a woman before her ex-husband does.’

‘Is it bad?’

‘It sounds like it might be real bad.’

Harley brought his screen to life with the jiggle of his mouse. ‘What do we have to go on?’

‘Just a name. Julie Albright.’

‘Great. Do we even know what state she’s in?’

‘We’ll start with Minnesota.’

‘Why are the cops having such trouble finding her?’ Roadrunner asked.

‘She’s in hiding.’

‘But if the cops can’t find her, how’s the ex-husband going to?’

‘He stole some files. He knows where she is.’

‘So does the IRS,’ Harley said, his fingers flying over his keyboard. ‘Why didn’t Espinoza try that?’

‘He did. It’s a sealed file.’

Harley’s hands dropped to his lap. ‘Jeez, Grace, the confidentials are a bitch to break into. This is going to take a hell of a lot longer than five minutes.’

‘Then we’d better get started.’

Ten minutes later, while the rest of them were still clattering on their keyboards, Annie clapped her hands and said, ‘Found her… oh, for heaven’s sake, would you look at that. Her address is Bitterroot.’

‘Our Bitterroot?’ Grace asked.

‘The very same. Dundas County.’

Harley made a face. ‘That place up in the sticks where we tweaked all that high-tech security last fall? Who the hell lives at a corporation?’

Grace picked up the phone and started to dial Tommy Espinoza. ‘She probably uses her place of work as a mailing address. She’s in hiding, remember?’